Information Technology (IT) companies and departments who support their customers' computer systems are constantly challenged with the need to provide timely and cost-effective support to their customers. Remote support provides the means for IT professionals to remotely access and to control customers' computer systems. This eliminates the need for the IT professionals to travel on-site to fix a problem and the delays in response time.
Enterprises (or organizations) with tiered support structure have many challenges in providing real time collaborative support to their end users when using remote control or remote access technologies. When a system or application requires support and maintenance, a single representative is often assigned to resolve the issue. Often, that representative needs help or assistance from a more experienced representative or a subject matter expert in resolving the issue. Most remote access and remote control tools support only “all or nothing” collaboration, resulting in the representative having access to only the resources that are actively connected to the remote support system. Because of this, organizations usually schedule call backs or reopen the issue and assign it to a different representative for addressing this issue at a later time. This delay in finding the experienced representative or subject matter expert when needed to provide real time support results in customer dissatisfaction, lengthy call resolution times, and prolonged outages to business critical systems. Some organizations use tools outside of a remote support system to facilitate finding the correct representative when needed. Use of disparate systems in providing support results in lack of control and lack of audit-ability, which undermines the compliance posture of the organization and ability to enforce service level agreements.
Enterprises (or organizations) may hire or use third party vendors to provide subject matter expertise and use these vendors in providing remote support assistance. When a system or application requires support and maintenance from a vendor, the vendor must be granted access in order to service the system or application effectively. Often, each technology vendor uses a different product, leaving the organization receiving support with little or no control over what remote access or remote control technologies are used. Use of disparate systems also makes it difficult for organizations to collaborate effectively in providing real time support. Moreover, most remote access and remote control tools support only “all or nothing” access, resulting in the vendor having much greater access than is required. Because of this, the organization receiving support does not have the ability to granularly control the permissions, access, and privileges granted to the technology vendor. Another area of challenge is that existing approaches do not record the activity of the technology vendor in the process of supporting the organization that is receiving support. In other words, support incidents do not have audit trails. This lack of control and lack of audit-ability undermines the compliance posture of the organization receiving support, thereby increasing the liability associated with receiving real time technology support from a vendor.
Traditional remote support approaches using remote control and visualization application tools depend on always-on connectivity of the representatives in providing support and collaborating within support sessions. Any representative that can be invited into a support session to resolve issues is expected to be connected to the remote support system. This results in high value subject matter experts not being available for real time support as their need to be on support sessions is sporadic and does not justify the effort and expense in having them always connected to the remote support system.
Traditional remote control and visualization application tools require a pre-installed client or the end customer to download and install a client prior to the start of a support session. In order to gain efficiencies, a Push and Start System can be used by the representative of a support organization to transfer an application to an attended or unattended remote system and execute the application to establish a session connection back to the representative. The Push functionality provides reach to systems which are visible from within the network that the support representative's computer is connected to via a Local Push method and reach to systems within remote networks through a Push via a Push Agent mechanism. Support sessions established with Push and Start, even though started efficiently, would have similar real time support challenges as other support sessions.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for approaches that provide real time remote support and management involving representatives or subject matter experts that are disconnected from or not always on the remote support system.